The Terrible Shrug

by Michael Doliner

May 24, 2004

Much has been said about the torture pictures and reports, but I think
one point has been missed. When I look at the picture of Lynndie England
pointing at the genitals of a prisoner, or Charles Graner smiling behind
the naked pyramid of Iraqis, or the picture of a prisoner cowering
before jailers, I am doubly horrified by the expressions upon the faces
of the torturers. The pictures look like snapshots from a vacation. The
torturers are vamping like children in front of a camera, and this makes
what they are doing all the more humiliating to the victims. They seem
to have no sense that to abuse and humiliate is something dark and
unholy. What we are seeing here is even worse than torture, as awful as
that is. For here is a methodical attempt to destroy the victims as
human beings, whereas ordinary torture to extract information has no
such goal. The ordinary torture victim suffers, but retains his humanity
if only because he is required to speak; here the victim is of no
account, a piece of rubbish. The macabre playfulness of the torturers
serves to humiliate the victims still further by diminishing even the
value of their suffering.

But the victims are not the only ones suffering. People have often done
horrible things to one another in the past, but they have known those
actions to be horrible. When someone does horrible deeds and does not
know those deeds are horrible, that is pathology. The torturers'
insouciance in the face of their own abominations marks this pathology,
but it is certainly not theirs alone. The senators on the Armed Services
Committee with their pompous expostulations and the military witnesses
appearing before it scrambling to avoid blame reveal their own ignorance
of the horror, and so share the pathology with the torturers. Nor do the
rest of us escape as we go about our daily business as if nothing has
happened. We too are ignorant and display the same pathology. Meanwhile,
the rest of the world gapes at us as if through the bars at monsters in
their cages.

It seems that Americans simply can't understand the extent of this
humiliating violation. We find it so easy to shrug it off. Perhaps it is
because our prison system has made it commonplace. We think of demeaning
rape and other humiliations as par for the course in prison. If some
child who happened to be caught with drugs is brutalized, oh well. We
easily find some justification, some sophistic mental gymnastic that
justifies their humiliation and distinguishes the victims from
ourselves. We might contrast this with what happened to Socrates in his
prison. On the day he is condemned to die his chains were removed and he
conversed in his normal way with his friends. When the time came no one
injected him or electrocuted him or hanged him. The jailer gave him the
poison and he drank it himself. No one violated him or even touched him.
The Greeks, of course, had slaves to whom this inviolability was not
granted precisely because they were thought to be less than human. But
we have denied any such intrinsic differences, and our culture is based
upon this denial.

Our literature and our cinema offer us very little help. Our art shows
plenty of torture, but tosses it off lightly. Torture reveals the bad
guy as bad and is the mark of his badness. His family or friends having
suffered torture, the good guy is justified in his equally bad behavior.
Ultimately, somehow, all is always made well again. The easy healing at
the end prevents seeing the violation in all its horror.

Torture, but not humiliating torture, is central to Christianity. Jesus
is a God and not a man. He often seems to be above it all. He is
suffering for us and his suffering is part of the plan. He knows of it
in advance and accepts it. In the end he will be resurrected whole and
purified. But his pain is ennobling and not undignified. Jesus is never
humiliated as the Abu Ghraib victims are. He is put up on a cross for
all to see, not hidden away and dumped in an alley like a piece of
garbage. Even if we imagine that Jesus could have endured anything and
retained his humanity and his godhood, it is precisely because the rest
of us can't that such torture is an abomination. In any case, from the
American response it is clear the Christianity does not reveal to
Americans what is so terrible about all this.

The Abu Ghraib pictures show a torture that is intended to demean and
humiliate the victim. Physical pain is not the main point, and the
victim suffers less pain than he might with other forms of torture. But
humiliation costs the victim his human dignity, and that, it seems, is
the torturers intention. He is shown to be worth nothing both by what is
done to him and the attitude of those doing it. Nor is the victim the
only target. It is clear that the entire population not only of Iraq,
but of all Muslim countries were to be humiliated through this
degradation. For the victims were picked up indiscriminately off the
street and might have been anybody. What distinguished them was simply
bad luck.

But why should only Muslims identify with the victims? Whoever fails to
do so is only lying to himself. Anyone who witnesses such humiliation is
also diminished, for he can only distinguish himself from the victim
through sophistry. What is being violated here is the victim's
fundamental humanity. With the dog collar he is being made into an
animal and a slave; with sexual humiliation his integrity is shattered.
Anyone in his place would suffer as he does. No, it didn't happen to
us, but only because we were not in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Our own humanity is thus worth no more than the flip of a coin. We are
human or not only as chance has made us so. Thus, chance is our new God.

To the Greeks the Iliad was a sacred text with all the wisdom for life.
It doesn't contain an example of such violation, but its culmination is
in Achilles' violation of Hector's dead body. Enraged by Hector's having
killed his friend Patroclus, Achilles kills him and drags his body
around the walls of Troy behind his chariot. Dragging the body and
allowing the dogs to feed on it was and abomination and everyone knew it
was an abomination. The goddess and god, Aphrodite and Apollo, protected
Hector's body from being torn by the dogs and the dragging, and
Patroclus's funeral pyre refused to light. The point is that everybody
knew that despoiling the body was unholy, even Achilles.
When the Fallujah resisters killed the four American contractors and
then burned their bodies they committed an abomination and intended to
commit an abomination, but at least they and everyone else knew it was
an abomination. And they did it, as Achilles did, in a fit of rage. The
torturers of Abu Ghraib, smoking, laughing, untroubled, posed the way
they might on a trip to the Grand Canyon. Now, of course, it is natural
that we respond more intensely to the violation of Americans in Fallujah,
but the torturers of Abu Ghraib, by humiliating the prisoners so
casually, demeaned them and us even more. To despoil a body violated its
human dignity, but to humiliate someone casually denies him human status
completely. Such is the meaning of the "banality of evil," which might
have been more clearly expressed as the evil of banality. Their treating
what they do as utterly ordinary is the final ineradicable horror.

But I do not mean to single out these soldiers as particularly
insensitive. Twisted as they were, they were, I fear, no more than
ordinary Americans doing a job. Some have said that they were enraged at
the Fallujah violations or at 9/11. I'm afraid the pictures give the lie
to this. No, there was no heat of passion, no real serious sense of
horror at all. But it is also clear from the pictures that all around
them there was no sensitivity to such abomination. Those around them
must have condoned their actions, and almost certainly ordered them. The
Red Cross report, the Taguba report, evidence coming out of Afghanistan
and Guantánamo, all attest to a culture of intentional human violation.
It was all just ordinary day to day routine operation.

The Abu Ghraib abominations grow as our elected representatives respond
to them inadequately. Bush's perfunctory apology reveals all too clearly
his wish to merely bury the incident. The abuse is of no importance and
he wishes it would go away. Rumsfeld's plea of ignorance is pathetic, as
is the Senate's failure to question him further about it. Either he knew
and he is lying and guilty of promulgating a policy of torture, or he
didn't know and he had inadequate control of his department. Either way
he should resign.

Near the end of the Iliad Priam, Hector's father, comes to Achilles to
beg for the body of his son. He reminds Achilles of his own father and
of his dead friend Patroclus. Achilles, the ultimate warrior, weeps, and
only then can he return Hector's violated body to Priam. It is in the
recognition of their common humanity that the abomination can at last be
expunged. Achilles, overcome by the death of his friend and recognizing
Priam as like his own father, can plausibly return to himself, recognize
his kinship to Priam in their common human suffering, and so restore
order. Achilles committed his violation in a fit of rage that others can
see as something like temporary insanity. His weeping is a breaking of
the madness.

Bush's handlers instinctively saw this when they had him say that "this
is not like us." But a policy of abuse carried on with bureaucratic
regularity, as opposed to a single instance, cannot plausibly be blamed
on temporary loss of oneself to rage or some other emotion. Such a
bureaucratic policy must be pursued without emotion, in cold blood, or
rather with no blood. Those who pursue such a policy can only shrug when
faced with their own actions. "What's the big deal?" is the hallmark of
the pathology.

Bush and his administration have pursued a policy in which Iraqis,
Afghans, and many others including some Americans, can be treated with
utter disdain. Absurd legalisms grease the way for abominations in many
places, and all is done without emotion and with a shrug, like pulling
weeds or killing insects. Abu Ghraib is special only because of the
pictures. Senators, generals, and Cabinet members only reveal the loss
of something of their humanity when they express their dismissive
response to the abominations. Their pathetic party loyalties cost them
far more than they know. It should be obvious, and is obvious to the
rest of the world, that Bush's words all serve to conceal an
indifference to and contempt for lives outside those of his circle. And
this circle is a lot smaller than most Americans imagine. It certainly
does not include the soldiers whose funerals he will not attend. Can you
plausibly believe that it includes you, gentle reader?

It is tempting to blame Bush and his administration for our appalling
condition, and to be sure he deserves a lot of blame. His cabal of
will-to-power junkies are certainly the worst American administration
ever, and their wars will in all likelihood cause immense suffering. But
as bad as they are, I fear they are only a reflection of a deep
pathology within the American public. What horrifies me more than the
Bush administration is its public acceptance. For where is a corrective
to come from? The palpable desire to minimize what has happened is, at
bottom, a desire to diminish human life itself, yet nobody seems to
notice. No, I feel that very few have any sense of what it means to
violate a human body, let alone a living person. But the response to
Abu Ghraib indicates just how cheaply Americans value life in spite of
their insistence to the contrary. To me the indifference to such actions
expresses acquiescence in the sentiment that human life is insect-like.

Undoubtedly, when Americans acquiesce in the degrading treatment of
Iraqis they separate themselves from them. They are, after all, the
enemy. As Senator Inhofe (R-OK) put it, "... they're murderers, they're
terrorists, they're insurgents." But of course many were nothing of the
sort. They were people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and
none of them had been tried. This is war, and in war people do horrible
things. It is said to be necessary in war to divide the world into "us"
and "them" and to do everything we can to destroy "them." It has become
a commonplace that in modern war the enemy is dehumanized, and must be.
But it should be all too clear that there is no permanent "us," that the
exclusionary circle can be drawn in many different ways, and that all
these ways are, ultimately, arbitrary. To make peace in the end we must
find a way to break the exclusionary circle and its arbitrary divisions.
We can only draw this circle and then erase it through a kind of fake
forgetting that is, in fact, mental and spiritual damage. That is
especially so in this war, for after all the early pretexts have melted
away, we now claim we are fighting to make "them" into "us" -- to turn Iraq
into a democracy. To treat them as insects is to declare that we
ourselves are insects.

Michael Doliner has taught at Valparaiso University and Ithaca College. He lives with his family in Ithaca, N.Y.

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